Karen Johnson
PhD Candidate, University of Michigan
Classical Art and Archaeology Program
Culture and Cognition Program

At first, archaeology was a secondary interest to me as an undergraduate. During the summer and fall of my junior year, however, Colgate afforded me several opportunities in Italy that dramatically changed my academic plans. I assisted Prof. Rebecca Ammerman with her archaeological research at Paestum, was able to participate in my first excavation in Tuscany made possible through her connections, and was a member of the Venice Study Group, which had a strong focus that year on classical archaeology. To put it frankly, I was hooked. Receiving personal attention from faculty members and experiencing their enthusiasm for the subject were each crucial elements in redirecting my career path. Moreover, archaeology is the kind of discipline that requires a spectrum of knowledge-geology, history, language studies, art history, and computer science, to name a few. This quality about archaeology and the fact that it dovetails with many kinds of area studies made archaeology an even more perfect fit for me than I initially realized.

I returned to Paestum the following summer with Rebecca Ammerman to continue her research, and with a Phi Eta Sigma Student Research Grant, I began some of my own on terracotta figurines of theatrical subjects, which became the focus of my senior thesis. Upon graduation in 1995, I started a master's program in Greek and Latin at the University of Georgia, accompanied by a financial award from Colgate for students pursuing graduate work in classical studies. When I decided I needed some time away from my own studies, I turned to the role of middle school Latin teacher. Both of my teaching appointments-at The Rivers School in Weston, MA and Owen J. Roberts Middle School in Pottstown, PA-were landed in large part because of my background in archaeology. I had the ability and knowledge to create teaching units on the Roman world that both kept my students engaged in the classroom and provided a cultural context for their studies in Latin.

It was not long, however, before I returned to my student identity. Today I am a doctoral candidate in the Classical Art and Archaeology Program at the University of Michigan, as well as pursuing a certificate in the Culture and Cognition Program, sponsored by the psychology and anthropology departments. True to the interdisciplinary spirit that brought me to archaeology in the first place, my research focuses on the subject of children and the experience of childhood, at both the thematic level and, in particular, at the Roman Egyptian town of Karanis. In effect, I seek to understand the social category of "child" and the material culture of childhood in an effort to build an archaeological methodology for childhood studies relevant to any historic or prehistoric context. Additionally, I do research in the domain of the archaeology of religion, where I investigate how recent work in the cognitive science of religion can be brought to bear on archaeological methods and case studies. I have always maintained broad interests, and the fact that this was honored and encouraged during my tenure at Colgate has played a significant part in my successes today.

Selected Bibliographic References

Forthcoming: "Textile Dolls from Karanis." The Kelsey Museum Bulletin.

September 2002: "Children encountering the past, the past encountering children: Cognitive aspects of play and the affordances of archaeological materials." Paper delivered at the European Association of Archaeologists Annunal Meeting; Thessaloniki, Greece.

August 2002: "Primary emergence of the doctrinal mode in the fifth and fourth millennia in southwestern Iran." Paper delivered at the conference, Modes of Religiosity: The Historiographical Evidence; Burlington, VT. Paper accepted for publication as part of a conference series; Altamira Press.

February 2000: "Fat babies have no shame: Or, visualizing children and childhood in classical Greece." Paper delivered at The University of Arizona Art History Graduate Student Symposium, The Ties that Bind: Constructions of Family, Childhood, and Home in the Visual Arts; Tuscon, AZ.